In the era before talkies, costumes had to speak volumes

Oscars 2013: Academy Awards costumes speak volumes

Although the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science Awards began handing out industry kudos in 1929, it didn’t recognize the art of costume design with an award until 1949.

This, despite the early starring role of costume design in creating indelible screen personas, from Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin (every male comedian had a signature hat) to the Gish sisters, Clara Bow and Theda Bara. Costume designers manipulated the silent on-screen narrative with fabric, all the while taking into account complexion, hair, lighting, art direction and cinematography. Designer Howard Greer’s costumes were important enough to Mary Pickford’s role in Coquette, her first talkie, that she acknowledged him in her 1929 Best Actress acceptance speech. The only silent film ever awarded an Oscar for Best Costume Design was a retro homage: Mark Bridges for The Artist, just last year.

Beth Werling, who researched the actress’s use of costume for her essay in film historian Christel Schmidt’s new monograph Mary Pickford: Queen of the Movies, details how a century ago, in 1913, Pickford became one of the first film actors to stipulate requirements for “a proper wardrobe” in her studio contract, shifting the financial burden from actress to employer. (In those days, actors not only wore their own clothes to auditions, but in the pictures themselves.) Pickford’s mother Charlotte was a seamstress, which may also account for some of the extra attention the actress placed on costume throughout her career. The cotton dress from 1922 remake of Tess of the Storm Country is the only remaining artifact from the film, Werling writes, and to reflect its ragamuffin heroine was “deliberately torn and mended in a mosaic of tan and blue patches, most of them hand sewn with oversized stitches in dark-colored thread that would show up onscreen.”

Later in the 1920s, as she produced and distributed her own movies and the roles she played progressed beyond the guttersnipes and orphans to more glamorous women of means, Pickford began to employ freelance designers such as Howard Greer, Mitchell Leison and Milo Anderson to create her costumes. One Leisen costume from 1923’s Rosita survives, an empire gown in gold lamé fabric trimmed in gold lace and green glass jewels. “Metallic fabric was a favorite of costume designers in the 1920s because of its reflective glow onscreen,” Werling observes.

“That lag time is fairly amazing to me,” says fashion historian Michelle Tolini Finamore. “That it took them that long to realize the integral part of the process they were and how a film actually looks is astonishing. But I think about it in terms of design history in general and even fashion design in general,” she adds; “you don’t have the same kind of respect afforded as a practice until the last fifteen years.”

Last year’s Oscar-winning homage to the genre, Michel Hazanavicius The Artist, has reignited an interest in the early examples of the medium, which is an area Finamore’s new book Hollywood Before Glamour explores in depth. Finamore, curator of fashion arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, spent five years researching the silent era of the teens and early 1920s, focusing on the mutual influence and intersection of the early American fashion and film industries. “If you look at the American Film Institute database the credits start appearing for the costume designers in the late 1920s but they’re still not always on-screen credits,” she explains.

Finamore set about discovering the industry’s earliest costume designers – many of them women, and all-but-forgotten; names like Jane Lewis of Vitagraph, Peggy Hamilton and a certain Mrs. Frank Farrington at Thanhouser. A little more is known about Clare West, the first ‘studio designer’ who created the costumes for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, later worked with Buster Keaton (on Sherlock, Jr.) and became Cecil B. DeMille’s costume designer for such epics as The Ten Commandements. The director’s edict was, “I want clothes that will make people gasp” and West’s infamous ‘octopus’ gown for Bebe Daniels in The Affairs of Anatol stole the show.

In those days, cinematic fashion was also bait for the new middle-class audience of women. Film marketing campaigns were built around costumes, Finamore discovered, citing advertisements like those she found in The Ladies World magazine that played up how Lady Duff Gordon, aka Lucile, “who had created the Mrs. Vernon Castle style of dressing,” would be designing Edna Mayo’s weekly costumes in the film serial The Strange Case of Mary Page, with a total costume budget of $250,000 (that was 1916; that’s over $5M today, eclipsing even Elizabeth Taylor’s infamous Cleopatra wardrobe budget).

Another silent film is in Oscars contention this season. Blancanieves, Pablo Berger’s silent film fantasia of the Snow White fable, transposes the tale to the torero community in turn-of-the-century and 1920s Seville. The beguiling black-and-white film (released last year in Europe but opening in North America only in March) is Spain’s Oscar entry for Best Foreign Film and swept their Goya awards earlier this month, including awards for screenplay, cinematography and artistic direction. Blancanieves also garnered a trophy for costumer Paco Delgado, whose work on the blockbuster Les Misérables, which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Costume Design.

Notable Fashion Designers in Early Film

Paul Poiret created the costumes for La Reine Elisabeth, 1912

Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon, for The Rise of Susan, 1916, and many others

George Barbier created more than sixty costumes for Monsieur Beaucaire, 1924

“I’m a big, big fan of silent movies,” Delgado says, by phone from Madrid. He cites Murnau’s Sunrise as a source of inspiration, as “such a genius of that time, with the use of expressionistic elements.” In that 1927 silent film classic, art director Rochu Gliese did both the production and costume design, wardrobing the Woman from the City temptress in glossy, slippery black satin that recalls a snake, in visual and symbolic contrast with the drab, flat cotton worn by Janet Gaynor’s virtuous longsuffering wife. Collaborating closely with Blancanieves‘ cinematographer Kiko de la Rica (with whom he has worked on several previous films), Delgado made similar choices on character design through texture. “You see it in the movie, playing with matte and shiny,” he says. “We wanted to have a lot of shiny materials, sequins through the movie, on the stepmother, the bullfighter outfits,” which are encrusted with embroidery. Shadows are cast through heavy Spanish lace, sourced from traditional suppliers in Seville and Cordoba, with the more delicate and fragile lace reserved for Snow White herself. “We were trying to give it an extra third dimension.”

Delgado and his director also looked to lesser-known silent works. “The one we watched most often was the last silent Spanish movie by Florian Rey, La aldea maldita — The Damned Village,” he says of their major reference, from 1930, along with French and Hollywood silent movies with latinate themes. “You have to remember that at that time the Spanish sort of things were very popular — they had big actors like Rodolfo Valentino sort of characters. And everything exotic was very highly sought in fashion.”

As the silent era’s elaborate villain costumes can attest, there’s grandiose fun to be had in dressing wickedness – like Charlize Theron in Colleen Atwood’s elaborate creations for Snow White & The Huntsman, or Julia Roberts’ Evil Queen in another of this year’s Oscar-nominated costume design films, Mirror Mirror. Blancanieves is no exception. Actress Maribel Verdú, who plays the stepmother Encama, has 18 costume changes, each more dramatic than the last. One fashionable photo shoot montage is something of Delgado’s winking caricature and homage to a bygone silent star. “It was a sort of Gloria Swanson,” the designer says of the array of turbans, bias-cut gowns (worn poolside), riding outfits and flapper diva costumes, at one point accessorized with greyhounds on a leash. “I love to make costumes that have a sort of humour,” Delgado says.

Finamore also laughs, recalling how after Swanson became a star, “she basically was bringing her designer with her everywhere, and she had the power to do that in that stage in her career!”

The costume historian hopes the recent revival of the genre will spark a new interest in the early silent era, beyond the usual screenings of Sunrise and to lesser-knowninfluential films and serials she researched for the book, such as The Perils of Pauline. “I love that whole class of film, because I think it’s just saying so much about what is happening, just culturally, with women and women’s right and this more aggressive screen personality for the figure of a woman.” Finamore’s other recommendations include Our Mutual Girl, for its, “original mix of fashion and culture and current events.” On-screen preoccupations from a hundred years ago that still seem thoroughly modern.